


Light Reading

by Hekate1308



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Gen, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Mary reading John's journal, Post 12x06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-22
Updated: 2016-11-22
Packaged: 2018-09-01 11:28:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8622853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hekate1308/pseuds/Hekate1308
Summary: She’d still been keeping a journal when she met John. She wondered what had happened to it, cringing as she remembered first her complaints, then her gushing about the handsome ex-marine she’d met.Mary reads John's journal.





	

She’d still been keeping a journal when she met John. She wondered what had happened to it, cringing as she remembered first her complaints, then her gushing about the handsome ex-marine she’d met.

It was probably a good thing that it had disappeared.

John had never known about it, she was sure of that.

But this wasn’t that kind of journal. No, this was the kind of journal she’d grown up with and despised, because it told her everything about the life she’d wanted to escape.

This was a hunter’s journal.

Like her father’s, like his parents’ before him.

Her hand slid over the name Henry Winchester printed in the leather; the boys had explained everything about their grandfather, or at least as much as they could in the time she’d spent with them.

She’d only leafed through it, that night in the bunker, that dark, sad place her sons called “home”.

Did Dean remember their real home? Sam had been a baby, but his brother...

Afterwards, she’d mostly used the journal to pinpoint where John had gone from Lawrence, until she’d read about Asa’s death.

Their breakfast together three days ago had been... good. They had smiled and laughed, it had been relaxing, even.

Sam, slightly sad but understanding, had hugged her when she said goodbye. Dean hadn’t. He’d only nodded and waited until they were done, leaning against the Impala.

She couldn’t read this son, this almost 40-year-old who had nothing of the happy child she had left behind.

So this evening, she decided to look for answers.

There had to be some information of how the boys had grown up in these pages.

Dean, the son she had left behind, slept with Sam in his crib after her death, and he wouldn’t talk –

_Dean moved away, not looking at me, not speaking a word, silent. Even when I took the journal and walked up the stairs, his silence different from Sam’s; it was deeper, damning, and I closed the door behind it with a feeling of relief –_

Oh no. Please, no. She hadn’t meant to hurt either of them that deeply.

She had just felt stuck, in this bunker, below surface, in a life she had never wanted or foreseen, with two strangers who were her children, but not those she had ever expected. She’d needed to get out, to remember, to feel again.

But surely, things had gotten better. After all, he’d seemed... well enough. Before she had told them she was leaving.

She was wrong.

Things didn’t get better.

Her little boy, watching his father kill a shape shifter before he was five years old.

John, her John, her loving husband, the great father she remembered... dragging her boys all over the states, teaching Dean how to handle guns when he couldn’t even read yet...

Sam’s first steps.

_He walked toward Dean, then fell flat on his face and started crying. Life is tough, kid. Do I sound like a proud father? I am._

“No” she said into the emptiness of her motel room, closing the journal.

He didn’t. He didn’t sound like a proud father at all.

And why would Sam take his first steps toward Dean instead of John, always Dean was the one to love him the most?

It was only the first year, however. Everyone went a little crazy with grief the first year after losing a spouse, they said.

She carefully opened the journal again, her thoughts flying at increasing pace.

_Dean was put in school late._

_Not a word about who looked after Sam while he was there._

_Dean enjoyed school; I knew he was smart –_

_Sam didn’t have a killer instinct when he was three? How could –_

_He drilled into Dean that Sam was his responsibility –_

And Mary remembered.

_“He was a great father”._

_Dean’s smile, late to come; Dean looking down, Dean looking unconvinced –_

_No, John would never, John wouldn’t –_

_“It’s okay, Mom. Dad still loves you”._

_That was before Sam was even born. Me and John had been fighting, he had left us, just as he left the boys in a motel room, again and again –_

She forced herself to read on. Her children were never supposed to learn how to shoot. They were never going to live like this, she’d sworn to herself when she had married John.

The boys grew older before her eyes.

Dean, fourteen, having received a gun on his eleventh birthday, taking a girl to the movies, his father deciding that he’d probably have countless children and arrest warrants by the time he was twenty.

 _I was going to show him a few letters before he went to school,_ she suddenly thought. _Dean loved picture books._

Sam and his computer for his eleventh birthday – _and that tells you all you need to know of the difference between them – why, John, why? If Dean felt he needed to be protected, it was your doing._

And worst of all. Her children going separate ways.

Dean, twenty-one, the sole reason his father didn’t buy him a beer that he felt certain he’d already drunk enough, the keys of the Impala in his hands, no congratulations, just a dismissal into the hunter life; Sam, disowned for going to Stanford.

And this man she no longer knew, this man she couldn’t believe she’d married, this man she felt certain she would never have loved if she could have foreseen, patting himself on the back on how he had raised their children.

Her children.

And the conviction, the knowledge –

_Dean, watching his father leave again and again. Knowing he’d only come back for a while._

_So when his mother left, things were clear. She’d always leave again._

That was why he wouldn’t hug her.

An hour ago, she had no idea what road she was supposed to take.

It was clear now.

She arrived at the bunker shortly after nightfall the next day, relieved to see the dear old Impala in the garage.

 _Her boys_ were home.

 Sam, as she’d suspected he would, greeted her enthusiastically.

Dean –

She hadn’t known before, but after reading of nothing but responsibility shifted unto a child’s shoulders, of a parent leaving again and again, of lonely, scared nights watching over his younger brother that must inevitably have followed, she found it, there in his eyes.

Resignation. Apathy.

He had been so happy when she had returned. Mary remembered how he’d stuffed the pie into his face, just to make her smile.

She had destroyed this, the trust, the happiness. Unwillingly, unknowingly, like John.

She had taken another part of his childhood from him.

Perhaps the last part he had been holding dear.

“You’ll stay in the same room as the last time?”

Not your room, she noticed. He didn’t think she’d stay. She nodded.

“Good, then. We’ve just come back from a hunt; if you don’t mind...”

He was already halfway out of the room.

Sam moved as if to intercept him, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Of course not. Sleep well, Dean.”

He seemed surprised but left.

“Mom...” Sam began. “I’m – “

“Don’t” she interrupted him softly. “I know you’re trying to... justify Dean’s behaviour, in a way. But there is nothing to justify.”

_I understand. I read it all._

Her son had never ceased to be the wonderful child who’d once hugged her in the kitchen, comforting her.

Otherwise he’d never have turned out to be the good man he was.

Soon after, Sam went to bed too; Mary told him she would go to sleep soon, well aware that it was  lie.

She knew it was no apology, that this – if she could fix it at all – would take a long time, but she still found herself looking for cookbooks. Dean loved home-cooked meals.

She wasn’t surprised to find that Dean had written in several of them.

_Too much garlic. Reduce by half._

_More water. It gets too dry._

_Sammy hates this._

_Cas says it tastes like “burned molecules”?_

Through all the twenty-nine years of her previous life, she’d never managed to get through a single recipe without some catastrophe. John (she wouldn’t think of him, not after reading all of this) had told her that she would even burn water, and she’d believed at that time it was true.

She shook her head.

“You’ve got work to do” she told herself strongly, reaching for the first book.

It would be so easy to leave it be and drive off again. Into a world where she could relive her memories without responsibilities.

But –

This – this running away, this hiding, this clinging to what she knew, she’d done that before. Before she’d finally decided to go with John. She could have left her parents before –

Before.

But she hadn’t, then. And now, she’d done the same thing. She hadn’t been Mary Winchester; no, she had been Mary Campbell again, holding onto the last memories she had instead of trying to build a picture of the present and a possible future.

It was time to be Mary Winchester.


End file.
